Both in the field of the consumer electronics, and in the industrial field, is known a great quantity of input/output devices capable to interface with electronic computers.
It is further known that today not only the traditional personal computers are the those which are capable to connect with input/output devices. With the arrival of the new generation of cellphones, portable computers, tablet PC, the user has available a great an heterogeneous typology of electronic computers (intended, according to the present description, as those electronic devices provided with at least a microprocessor configurable to be capable of receiving/transmitting signal and/or command data from and an input/output device connected to the electronic computer itself); all these data processors are capable to interface themselves with industrial or commercial input/output devices.
Due to this great quantity of types of electronic computers, the various input/output devices shall be designed to dialogue with a same great variety of operating systems, typically incompatible one with the other, like for example Windows XP, 7, 8, MacOS, Linux, Unix, Android or others.
The “compatibility” between an input/output device and an electronic computer is guaranteed by a computer software, technically said driver, capable to realize an interface between the real commands imparted to/from the input/output device from/towards the electronic computer.
The development, and the testing (alpha, beta testing, performance testing) of the drivers for all the operative systems which are present on the market causes a considerable slowing down of the introduction of the input/output devices on the market. In fact, even if exist some types of input/output devices wherein the non-perfect efficiency of a driver can be somewhat tolerated or tolerable, especially in the industrial field, and further less in the medical or financial sector, input/output devices with drivers which are not perfectly tested absolutely cannot be introduced on the market.
Furthermore, exists a great quantity of operating systems or their versions which are obsolete, but yet used. In particular, for the niche sectors, like for example the control systems of big industrial apparatuses, or for the control of banking electronic instruments, people still yet entrusts to electronic computers provided with operating systems sometimes really ancient, and this is because the obsolete operating system is easy to manage, for sure more tested during the time with respect to a new one, and due to the evolution required by hardware resources, often does not require imposing technical features. It is not rare, for example, to see electronic computers in the industrial field that still operate with operating systems like Windows 95, or XP. Discarding the realization of drivers for those operating systems, for the producer of the input/output device means cutting a significant part of the market.
Nevertheless, the software driver installation on a personal computer or more in general on an electronic computer requires the use of authorization criteria like system administrator, or anyway authorizations for modifying software on the operating system of the electronic computer that not always the user possesses. This, where it is necessary to use new software driver for interfacing to an input/output peripheral, causes the need of intervention of a technician, system manager or administrator with administrator access rights. Time and costs respectively become longer and more expensive.
Furthermore, the applicative software that are run on the computer shall be able to recognize the driver of the different devices and to connect to them in a specific way for each different existing driver; this implies a waste of time during the software programs development and testing and also a risks of scarce reliability, in particular during the phase of recognizing. Another problem rests in that many programming languages and development environments, it is not even possible to access to drivers that realize input/output functions, or it is possible only with complex low level function calls in the operating system.
The scope of the present invention is therefore to describe an interface device between input/output devices and an electronic computer that solves the aforementioned drawbacks.
In the same way, it is a scope of the present invention to describe a method of interface between input/output devices and an electronic computer that allows to solve the aforementioned drawbacks.